Peter Fisk

I bumped into psychologist Susan David from Harvard Medical School at this year’s Thinkers50 Global Awards Gala, held in London. I was immediately struck by her warm, inspiring and thought provoking presence. Just like her latest book.

I love her thinking on emotional agility. We’ve all heard the one about EQ not IQ, but EA is much better.

One of the biggest challenges I see in leaders today is their ability to have a more flexible mindset, to consider new ideas, alternative perspectives, make new connections, and generally cope with change.

Later that evening she scooped one of the top awards for her latest thinking.

In her book Emotional Agility Susan describes a revolutionary, science-based approach that allows us to navigate life’s twists and turns with self-acceptance, clear-sightedness, and an open mind. She developed this concept after studying emotions, happiness, and achievement for more than twenty years. She found that no matter how intelligent or creative people are, or what type of personality they have, it is how they navigate their inner world—their thoughts, feelings, and self-talk—that ultimately determines how successful they will become.

The way we respond to these internal experiences drives our actions, careers, relationships, happiness, health—everything that matters in our lives. As humans, we are all prone to common hooks—things like self-doubt, shame, sadness, fear, or anger—that can too easily steer us in the wrong direction. Emotionally agile people are not immune to stresses and setbacks. The key difference is that they know how to adapt, aligning their actions with their values and making small but powerful changes that lead to a lifetime of growth. Emotional agility is not about ignoring difficult emotions and thoughts; it’s about holding them loosely, facing them courageously and compassionately, and then moving past them to bring the best of yourself forward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_6hu6JLH98&t=6s

In this TED Talk she shares how the way we deal with our emotions shapes everything that matters: our actions, careers, relationships, health and happiness. In this deeply moving,humorous and potentially life-changing talk, she challenges a culture that prizes positivity overemotional truth and discusses the powerful strategies of emotional agility.

Jeff Bezos shared some of his “life wisdom” in a conversation with his younger brother Mark at the recent Summit Series in Los Angeles, as TechCrunch reports.

Bezos, now the richest man in the world according to Forbes, took a risk when he started the supergiant of the internet age, that is now Amazon. He was working as a software engineer on Wall Street, and in 1994 he left his job despite concern from his boss about leaving to start his own company.

But Bezos didn’t want to look back wondering what would’ve happened if he didn’t pursue his vision: “The best way to think about it was to project my life forward to age 80,” he told his brother about deciding to start Amazon. He wanted to make a decision that “minimized my regrets. You don’t want to be cataloguing your regrets,” he said, adding that if his project did fail, “I would be very proud when I was 80 that I tried.”

And for someone who heads a platform built on the web, Bezos is surprisingly thoughtful about how he uses his phone. His brother Mark noted that Jeff is “rarely distracted by his phone,” according to TechCrunch. “When I have dinner with friends or family, I like to be doing whatever I’m doing, I don’t like to multitask,” Bezos said.

Another thing Bezos doesn’t like is the idea of work-life balance: “I think work-life harmony is a good framework. I prefer the word ‘harmony’ to the word ‘balance’ because balance tends to imply a strict tradeoff.” He reiterated these statements at Summit, telling his brother that being a valuable and cooperative coworker makes his life outside the office better, and vice versa: “If I’m happy at home, it makes me a better employee, a better boss.”

 

More from TechCrunch:

The final line of Jeff’s high school Valedictorian speech:

“Space, the final frontier. Meet me there” he said, turning Star Trek’s motto into a call to action.

How he learned resourcefulness: 

Jeff spent summer from age four to sixteen on an isolated farm owned by his grandfather he called “Pop”. Without access to outside help, Pop had to rely on himself. Jeff said. Pop went as far as making his own needles and doing his own veterinary work like suturing cattle. Jeff spent a summer repairing an old piece of Caterpillar construction equipment Pop had bought for $5000 — a huge discount because it was entirely broken. When the giant mail-order gears for the repair arrived, they were too heavy to move…so Pop built his own miniature crane to lift them. “He would take on major projects he didn’t know how to do, and then he did them” says Jeff.

On practicing resilience: 

Jeff’s Pop once tore the top of his thumb off. He had tried to jump out of his moving truck and unlatch the farm’s gate before the car slid through, but the car slammed into the gate that nearly took off Pop’s finger, which was hanging on by a thread. He was so mad that he tore the top of the thumb off and threw it in the brush, then drove himself to the hospital. Rather than have his thumb stitched to his side to regrow, Pop just had the docs do a quicker skin graft from his butt. Jeff distinctly remembers how from then on “his thumb grew butt hair”. But rather than complain, Pop would just shave his thumb along with his face. “Each time you have a set back, you’re using resilience and resourcefulness, and inventing your way out of a box” says Jeff.

On raising kids:

Jeff and his wife let their kids use sharp knives since they were four and soon had them wielding power tools, because if they hurt themselves, they’d learn. Jeff says his wife’s perspective is “I’d much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid.”

On choosing a romantic partner:

When Jeff decided he was ready to settle down, his friends set him up on tons of blind dates. He eventually knew he’d found his wife when he met someone truly resourceful. “I wanted a woman who could get me out of a third-world prison” Jeff said. 

How he knew to leave his job and start Amazon:

Jeff had a been working in finance software engineering on Wall Street. But in 1994, he told his boss he wanted to start an Internet book store. His boss told him it was a pretty good idea but that it was “a better idea for someone who didn’t have a good job.” Jeff took a few days, and decided “the best way to think about it was to project my life forward to age 80” and make the decision that “minimized my regrets. You don’t want to be cataloguing your regrets.”

And while you might feel remorse for things you did wrong, he said more often regrets stem from the “path not taken” like loving someone but never telling them. “Then it was immediately obvious” that he should leave to start Amazon. “If it failed, I would be very proud when I was 80 that I tried.”

What he’d be doing if he wasn’t ‘Jeff Bezos’:

“My best guess is I’d be a very happy software engineer” following his interest in machine learning and AI. But he admits “I have this fantasy of being a bartender. I pride myself on my craft cocktails.” But be warned, he says he’s extremely slow. His fantasy bar would have a sign saying “do you want it good or do you want it fast?”

On his personal connection to the news and owning the Washington Post:

Jeff says “Pop obsessively watched the Watergate hearings” in 1973. That might have subconsciously influenced how high he values investigative journalism, which he expressed by acquiring the Washington Post in 2013.

On space entrepreneurship:

The key to opening the opportunities of space is reducing the price of getting objects out of Earth’s gravity. “We have to lower the cost of admission so thousands of entrepreneurs can have startups in space, like we saw with the Internet”, noting how web companies exploded in popularity as infrastructure costs came down.

On how to establish work-life balance:

“I like the phrase ‘work-life harmony’”, Jeff says. “Balance implies there’s a strict trade-off.” If he feels like he’s adding value and is a productive member of a team at work, “it makes me better at home. If I’m happy at home, it makes me a better employee, a better boss.” Don’t be someone who drains energy out of their co-workers or family. He believes it’s not just about how you allocate hours in the day, but whether you have enough energy to participate with enthusiasm.

On how to be an inventor:

Because the world is so complicated, you have to be a “domain expert” to find solutions to problems. “But the danger is that once you’re a domain expert, you can be trapped by that knowledge.” You have to approach things with childlike curiosity. Inventors are the experts with beginners minds, he says.

On what defines you:

“We all get to choose our life stories. It’s our choices that define us, not our gifts. You can only be proud of your choices” Jeff says. You either choose a life of “ease and comfort”, or of “service and adventure”, and when you’re 80, you’ll be more proud of the latter.

And finally, his most ridiculous quote of the talk:

When discussing the tarmac celebration pictured up top after the successful landing of his Blue Origin New Shepard reusable rocket, Jeff said “My cowboy hat still has champagne stains. The best kind of stains.”

Thanks to TechCrunch and Summit Series.

When P&G acquired Gillette for $57 billion a decade ago, everyone described it as a perfect marriage of the two leaders in women’s and men’s beauty products. Gillette could develop razors of women, with soaps to match, whilst P&G could surf across men’s new enthusiasm for grooming. The best mass market brands for everyone. Reshaping the world of beauty.

Disruptive beauty

10 years later, economic tsunamis and exponential technologies, and the resultant change in priorities and influences of consumers, have transformed the way in which brands win. In October 2016, Coty completed its merger with P&G Specialty Beauty Business, transforming Coty into one of the world’s leading beauty companies with the number one position in fragrances, and number two and three positions in salon hair and color cosmetics, respectively. Coty’s positioning is not about being big, but about being the challenger. It seeks to reignite its entrepreneurial heritage, to focus on the profit niches, and drive new innovation.

New start-ups can reach further and compete faster than the beauty giants still wedded to old ways of thinking – large size products, retail sales, and superficial imagery. Look at the cult success of Dollar Shave Club with 3 million subscribers, snapped up by Unilever for $1 billion. Millennial consumers have different priorities and new heroes. Look at the demand for Urban Decay amongst fast-grown-up teens. Brands are no longer built through advertising, but through the peer to peer influence of Instagrammers and vloggers. Look at Michelle Phan’s weekly Youtube audience, and her Ipsy brand.

Download The Beauty Economy Special Report 2017

Across the world, new ideas, new businesses and new solutions are transforming every market. “Gamechangers” think and act differently. They innovate every aspect of their brand and marketing. From Alibaba to Zipcars, Ashmei to Zidisha, Azuri and Zynga, a new generation of businesses are rising out of the maelstrom of economic and technological change across our world. These are just a few of the companies shaking up our world.

Gamechangers are disruptive and innovative, start-ups and corporates, in every sector and region, reshaping our world. They are more ambitious, with stretching vision and enlightened purpose. They see markets as kaleidoscopes of infinite possibilities, assembling and defining them to their advantage. They find their own space, then shape it in their own vision. Most of all they have great ideas. They outthink their competition, thinking bigger and different. They don’t believe in being slightly cheaper or slightly better. That is a short-term game of diminishing returns.

What does it take?

I asked 1000 business leaders to nominate the companies who they believe are creating the future in each different sector. The top 100 innovators are big and small, spread across every sector and continent, from Asia to the Americas, finance to fashion. And then we wanted to understand what they did differently.

They range from well known innovators like Amazon and Apple – the magic Dash buttons creating a direct link between consumer and brands, the ecosystems that go beyond devices – to new brands like Brazil’s Beauty’in fusing the world of food and cosmetics, or even Zespri redefining the obscure Chinese gooseberry as the superfood Kiwi fruit.

They capture their higher purpose in more inspiring brands that resonate with their target audiences at the right time and place, enabled by data and technology, but more through empathetic design and rich human experiences. They fuse digital and physical, global and local, ideas and networks. Social media drives reach and richness, whilst new business models make the possible profitable. They collaborate with customers, and partner with other business, connecting ideas and utilising their capabilities. They look beyond the sale to enable customers to achieve more, they care about their impact on people and the world, whilst being commercially successful too.

As they say in the GoogleX moonshot factory, in seeking to reinvent everything from cars to healthcare, “Why be 10% better, when you could be 10 times better?”

Who’s changing the game of beauty?

So who are the most interesting “gamechangers” of beauty? Not just creating new and distinctive products, but redefining the industry itself, what it’s called, why it matters, who to trust, where to start, and what matters most. They embrace the potential of new markets (like South Korea, the world’s fast growing beauty market), new consumers (like millennials, with their caring and collaborative mindset), new business models (subscription not transactional, gifting not functional), new channels, new devices, new price points, new experiences, and more …

Neutrogena Skin360

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT8NVRViy5M

Neutrogena’s new Skin360 app and SkinScanner attachment for the iPhone is developed in collaboration with start-up FitSkin. The device uses the phone’s camera combined with sensors and 30x magnification to capture data about a user’s skin.

L’Oréal UV Sense

At less than 2mm thick and only 9mm wide, the UV Sense is designed to be worn on the thumbnail and can store three months of data. Using NFC technology, the data is transmitted to an accompanying smartphone app, which tracks UV exposure, measures specific activities and makes recommendations on when to take shade or apply sun protection. The sensor was designed in partnership with Yves Béhar’s Fuseproject studio, which worked to create a wearable that wasn’t a distraction but integrated into the body. ‘We didn’t want you to think of it as a product, but rather as an ornament,’ says Béhar. ‘We want it to be something that you want to wear, that you don’t have to think about charging or where it is – it accompanies you throughout your day.’

Schwarzkopf Professional SalonLab 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=remHNNACZsc

Henkel Beauty Care and its leading salon brand Schwarzkopf Professional are pioneering the salon of the future with the Schwarzkopf Professional SalonLab – a digital ecosystem for quantifying and customizing the hair care experience, propelling hair salons into the digital age. This technology takes the guess work out of which products and services are best for each client’s hair by analyzing hair at the molecular level, empowering the consultation process with data-driven insights and producing on-demand, personalized care solutions.

HiMirror

HiMirror ‘s smart mirror assesses a person’s skin quality, and is now equipped with Alexa, so that users can ask for information as they do their make-up or easily order products through Amazon. By taking a makeup-free photo, HiMirror detects dark or red spots, under eye circles, wrinkles, pores, fine lines and other imperfections.

Waft, customised fragrances direct to you

Not all perfumes are created equally. Waft’s revolutionary method of selecting fragrance by personality and mood is disrupting the industry. Our exclusive layering method allows you to do just that by empowering you to mix and match different custom fragrances. Our product is world-class with only the finest, quality ingredients uniquely tailored to deliver Personalised Perfume: For her. For him. For you

Stowaway, the black dress of beauty

Selling mini-sized lipsticks, blushes and foundations direct to consumers. Chelsa Crowley and her co-founder Julie Fredrickson started the company after realizing they never used up all their makeup before it expired. Crowley had an extensive background in the cosmetics industry working for Mac and Bobbi Brown and decided to do something about her dilemma.

Scent Trunk, fragrance matching at home

Scent Trunk designs original fragrances for you based on a guided process of discovery. It starts with a Scent Test. The Scent Test is meant to be fun and shared with friends. Take time to sample the palette of our six core scents. Tell us what you like, and what you don’t. We’ll send you an original fragrance based on your response.  A 30-day supply of your custom fragrance will cost $11.99 per month, free shipping, if you decide to opt in.

Onomie Beauty, direct to you

Onomie combine advanced skincare and modern makeup to create highly efficacious beauty products that simplify your life. We cut out the middleman and sell directly to customers via our website to offer the best price on superior quality luxury skincare and makeup hybrids.

Glossier, cosmetics for the Instagram generation

“Women today have different needs than we have had in the past, but beauty companies haven’t necessarily been the most reactive to that,” says Emily Weiss who launched the skincare and cosmetics brand in 2014. “We wanted to create a very democratic movement, and the channels most fitting that goal were direct, digital ones.”

Read the full Gamechangers case study of Glossier

 

Tatcha Skincare … beauty inspired by the Japanese Geisha

Read more about Tatcha and how founder Vicky Tsai turned a Geisha secret into a cosmetics innovation, In fact Tsai’s business card reads “chief treasure hunter”. See the new Gamechangers Live Case Study.

Adorn … 3d printing foundation pen

Find out more about Adorn, the world’s first 3d printing foundation pen, that creates personalised foundation to match your skin.

Blow.LTD … the “Uber of beauty” on demand to you

Read more about Blow.LTD and how they secured funding from the likes of Unilever to turn their salon experience into “the Uber of beauty” that comes to you.

Zenta by Vinaya … first think human, then think tech

Zenta is the wearable tech fashion range from Kate Unsworth, the 28 year old artist and mathematician who believes in transforming people’s inner wellbeing through human-centred tech. See the new Gamechangers Live Case Study.

MatchCo … customised cosmetics from your phone

MatchCo is one of the latest, and most interesting players in the customised beauty market, which has never really taken off. Yet. The Santa Monica-based business focuses on personalised foundations through a phone-based app.

Isamaya French … fusing art and fashion 

Read more about Isamaya Ffrench the young London make-up artist who fuses fashion and art in the most striking, bizarre and creative styles. See the new Gamechangers Live Case Study.

Hourglass focus on feminists

California cosmetics brand Hourglass just launched Girl Lip Stylo, an empowerment-infused line of feminist lip shades.  Girl Lip Stylo is a lipstick, liner and balm hybrid that not only fulfils a multitude of makeup needs but does so in a hydrating, lightweight feeling kind of way, with hues including vivid fuschia ‘Leader’, brick red ‘Visionary’ and soft rose ‘Inventor’, to name but a few of the positive cosmetic role models on offer.

Bevel shave system for black hair

Bevel, by Walker & Company, provides premium grooming products & services, designed to help reduce razor bumps & skin irritation. While most guys are prone to razor bumps, black men are often the most susceptible. It’s estimated that eight out of 10 males with razor bumps are black. This is because curly hair is more likely to become ingrown hair.

Nailbot is smartphone nail printer

The Nailbot is powered by Preemadonna, a community of dynamic technologists inspiring creativity and self expression with their inventions. The Nailbot is the Smartphone Nail Art Printer. It prints custom instant nail art directly on your fingernails in 5 seconds!

How to get started?

Whilst innovations from La Prairie’s skin caviar to Dove’s campaign for real beauty, have continued to drive the world of beauty brands, it is now time for a real “gamechanger” … to challenge the world order, to make consumers really think differently, and to create a disruptive and desirable new approach.

This is my challenge in the week ahead, working with some of the world’s most talented and ambitious beauty brands to explore new possibilities, new perspectives and new potential for brands and consumers. There is much inspiration from within the industry, learning from a new breed of entrepreneurs like Kate Unsworth and Isamaya French, but also learning from other game changers in other industries, like the 100 profiled in my new Gamechangers book, and the Live Case Studies online.

We’ll be using the new disruption tools from the Gamechangers Labs to stretch out thinking, and reframe our worldview, to question the fundamentals of what made brands successful in the past, and what will win in the future. And the InnoLab fast and facilitated innovation process to make new ideas happen.

Download the summary of my keynote Changing the Game of Beauty

Scott Anthony is my favourite innovation guy.

Whilst we have Business Models and Design Thinking, Disruptive Innovation and Lean Startups, Scott focuses on the reality of making innovation happen in the business. The problem with innovation, too often, is that it is the most important thing for the business (it moves us forwards, it makes us better, it creates our future), but also the least important (it is often without a function, a role for everyone but responsibility of nobody, and a nice to have compared to quarterly results). Of innovation matters, and is much more important than quarterly results.

I loved Scott’s work on Procter & Gamble’s “Growth Factory“.

Back in 2000 the prospects for P&G’s Tide, the biggest brand in the company’s fabric and household care division, seemed limited. The laundry detergent had been around for more than 50 years and still dominated its core markets, but it was no longer growing fast enough to support P&G’s needs.

A decade later Tide’s revenues have nearly doubled, helping push annual division revenues from $12 billion to almost $24 billion. The brand is surging in emerging markets, and its iconic bull’s-eye logo is turning up on an array of new products and even new businesses, from instant clothes fresheners to neighborhood dry cleaners.

This isn’t accidental. It’s the result of a strategic effort by P&G over the past decade to systematize innovation and growth. You can read the full story in  How P&G Tripled Its Innovation Success Rate. Scott wrote the full story in How to Create a Growth Factory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yVlXRTMxpE

Scott’s most recent book is Dual Transformation. When I recently ran a fabulous event exploring “the world’s top 50 business ideas in one day”, the participants overwhelmingly chose this idea, as the most important to take back to their businesses. A+B+C = Dual Transformation.

Sounds simple. But if you think how many companies today are trying to sustain their existing businesses, whilst also creating the future, it becomes invaluable.

A is about reinventing today, optimising and innovating the legacy business if you like without throwing away all its good stuff (like sustaining revenues), whilst B is about creating the future business, the more disruptive ideas and business models that are more risky but could be great. C is how you leverage your relevant assets to support both.

In our recent book Dear CEO, my Thinkers50 colleagues and I asked 50 top thinkers to write an open letter to the world’s CEOs about the most important thing for them to think about. This is Scott’s letter.

Dear CEO

It’s cliché to say that the pace of change is accelerating. Indeed, that statement has arguably been true since the renaissance. But something feels different today. Businesses built painstakingly over decades get ripped apart almost overnight. Innosight’s research shows that 50% of the companies on the S&P 500 will not be on the list in 10 years. Many of the companies that will replace today’s giants likely do not even exist today.

Every business leader needs to think about the impact of ever-accelerating change. Broad trends such as the rise of robots and drones, the disappearance of computers into everyday life, everything-as-a-service, and big data analytics promise to bring disruptive change to every nook and cranny of the global economy.

Many leaders describe increasing uncertainty as an existential challenge. Indeed, it causes a leader to question his or her very identity. Most leaders ascended to their current position by mastering the intricacies of today’s business, making rigorous, fact-based decisions. They need to develop new skills to make decisions using judgment and intuition, replacing an optimization mindset with an exploration one.

While the pattern of market leaders being felled by disruptive upstarts feels like an essential factor of capitalism, it carries a heavy transaction tax, destroying know-how formulated over decades and ripping local communities apart. And, it is unnecessary, because the forces that threaten to disrupt today’s business simultaneously creates the possibilities of creating tomorrow’s. Leaders that learn how to bend the forces of disruption in their favor can own the future, rather than be disrupted by it.

Responding to the challenge requires executing what we call dual transformation. Transformation A repositions today’s business to increase its relevance and resilience. Think about how Adobe shifted its core business from selling packaged software to providing on-demand access over the Internet, or Hilti went from selling tools to providing tool management solutions. Transformation B creates tomorrow’s growth engine. Consider how Amazon.com turned an internal effort to accelerate IT projects into a multi-billion-dollar cloud computing offering, or how Nestlé is creating a portfolio of health and wellness businesses.

We call it dual transformation because these two transformations need to be pursued in parallel. This is not unrelated diversification. Rather, Transformations A and B should be connected by a carefully crafted and actively managed “capabilities link” that flips the innovator’s dilemma into an opportunity. After all, while a large company can’t innovate faster than the market, it can innovate better than the market if it combines together unique assets of scale with entrepreneurial energy.

Dual transformation is the greatest challenge a leadership team will ever face. Successfully managed, it reconfigures the essence of a company. Some of the old remains, just as it does when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly or ice turns into steam. But, as in those metaphors, the form or substance of an organization fundamentally changes. Mastering dual transformation requires:

• The courage to choose before signals are clear. The more obvious the need to transform, paradoxically, the harder it is to do it.
• The clarity to focus on tomorrow’s growth opportunities, even if it means saying goodbye to important pieces of yesterday’s business.
• The curiosity to explore in the face of significant uncertainty, and to handle the inevitable false steps, fumbles, and, yes, failures that comes along with moving in new directions.
• The conviction to persevere in the face of dark days, when key executives question the depth of commitment, conflict between today and tomorrow emerges, and fundamental issues of identity threaten to distract or derail progress.

Dual transformation is also the greatest opportunity a leadership team will face. Disruptive change creates a window of opportunity to create massive new markets. It is the moment where the market also-ran can become the market leader. It is the moment when business legacies are created.

To start the journey of becoming the next version of yourself, ask three deceptively simple questions. Who are we today? Who will we become tomorrow? How do we start making the change? Remember that the biggest risk is not the action you take, it is trying fruitlessly to cling to the status quo as the world changes around you.

Leaders that catch disruptive changes early and respond appropriately will have the ability to thrive in the years to come. Those that don’t, well, Darwin has a way of taking care of them.

Scott Anthony

The Future Book Forum is the world’s largest gathering of book publishers and printers, exploring the best new ideas for innovation and growth. Enabled by Canon, the event is fast and inspiring, practical and collaborative.

Over the last 4 years we set out an an ambitious journey, to define a better future for the book. Whilst we all recognise that digital technologies have fundamentally transformed lives and industries, we also recognised that it can also enhance the physical world. Making real things – in our case, books – even more personal, intelligent and useful.

We started by creating a future vision for the book publishing industry, one in which publishers and printers, authors and readers, could work together to create more inspiring and more profitable experiences. Whilst most discussion tends to focus on the digital impact of online distribution and digital formats, and there are clear benefits to adopting digital technologies in the supply chain for printing on demand and personalisation, we wanted to go beyond this.

Most importantly we needed to understand the outside world – the changing customer. For every one of us, the way we shop, the way we stay in touch with friends, the way in which we learn, the way in which we are entertained has been quite dramatically changed. Whilst young people have naturally embraced a new world, largely centred around their smart phones, every age group, at work and home have migrated to new ways of gaining and sharing content.

We then looked at the business model. Digital printing technologies offered in simple way to reduce the risk in publishing, being able to print small batches on demand, develop regular updates and special editions, reduce warehouse stocks and speed up time to market. But this is largely a story of cost efficiency. We explored how publishers could do much more to drive growth too, to increase revenues and in particular profitability, by leveraging content in new ways.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ze6TVxfrgY

In 2017 we went further … to define the “smart book”. Forget the artificial division of print and digital, people consume knowledge across platforms, and therefore the best books embrace both worlds too. How can you bring together the best of physical (tangible, browsable, artistic, treasurable) and digital (instant, customisable, efficient, updatable), in order to create something more power … a book of the future … a smart book? What does this means, what are the building blocks, and how do they combine?

To inspire us, we looked beyond the world of publishing to how other consumer experience are changing, for example like Netflix and Spotify in taking traditional movie or music content, and repurposing it for today’s consumers. Whilst the content is still there, it is delivered through fundamentally new experiences – across multiple platforms, customised to users by understanding them as individuals, and more profitable by applying new business models such as subscription and partnered content.

Tchibo might not seem an obvious parallel, but is actually a fabulous inspiration. The German coffee brand first explored delivering its products across multiple own-branded channels, from retail stores to consumer direct. It then added to the store experience, offering a wide range of unusual but relevant merchandise. It changed its stock every two weeks, to drive curiosity and frequent visits, and it used catalogues and special promotions to engage it target consumers on an ongoing basis. Just think about the parallels … So what emerged as “the DNA” of a smart book?

For starters, there is still a great future for the “book” … but it needs to be a much more significant, more engaging and profitable concept than just printed pages. The “smart book” is the book plus more. Augmented with technology, integrated into the digital world, enabling the user to do more,  (and the publishers to make more money, too!). A big and emotive debate, was what sits at its heart – some said content, others said the user. A bit like “the chicken or the egg” perhaps, but also an important philosophical point from where to start. And then what else matters most – including a great debate about the roles of big data and personalisation. Eventually, an order emerged.

What’s the DNA of a “smart book”?

• User … the consumer of ideas, young or old, professional or educational, sitting at home, on the go
• Content … the idea, from words to video, diagnostics and toolkits, co-created and additive over time
• Big Data … driving personalisation, algorithms predicting relevance, or learning and adapting
• Brand … a more relevant and meaningful for the user, that can work across platforms and time
• Participation … the content becomes interactive, co-created or actionable, real and engaging
• Community … enabling people to share their passion, their knowledge, their content together
• Platform … across formats and devices, physical and digital, published to live interactions
• Guidance … people need direction and support, curated or advisory, passively or actively
• Design … driving the usability and interaction across devices, easy and inspiring to engage with
• Journey … an ongoing experience, with new content, that evolves with the user and their needs

We took this emerging DNA of a smart book, and focused it on Education 4.0.

How is the world of education changing? For children, students and throughout life? We will explore the big trends in more modular, collaborative and lifelong learning, and understand the new opportunities for content, and the role of the smart book in supporting this. I certainly know, through my own teen age children (who lie on their beds glued to their phones), that the nature of study, revision, testing and progress has fundamentally changed from the days of chalkboards and text books.

Education 4.0 refers specifically to the way in which technology is transforming conventional education practices (an echo of Industry 4.0). From peer to peer learning (social media enabling children to teach each other in more relevant and engaging ways) to customised content (taking ongoing test results, then personalised learning to each individual), from learning “why and where” rather than “what and how” (information is always accessible, so its more than the old memory test) and being able to link all of this to learning for life (ongoing challenge as we live longer, how to embrace continuous learning at all ages).

What’s the DNA of an educational “smart book”?

• User … recognising each student as an individual, with different capabilities and learning needs
• Content … more than a text book, from games to video, diagnostics and toolkits, and much more
• Big Data … customising content through personal data, regular diagnostics and learning algorithms
• Brand … integrating the education brand in a way that is more engaging to teachers and students
• Participation … fully interactive, engaging with teachers, and with peers, learning together
• Community … sharing passion and ideas, learning is no longer local, or limited by school walls
• Platform … typically mobile centric, for teens of today, but linking formats and devices together
• Guidance … the role of the teacher changes from content deliverer to curated and learning coach
• Design … driving the usability and interaction across devices, easy and inspiring to engage with
• Journey … an ongoing experience, throughout school years, but also through work and life too

Each year we build on what we did previously. The “smart book” definition and development this links well with the more creative approach of the previous year, when we imagined what a future book could look like. Looking back, with the new DNA model to help us, it actually makes a lot of sense. The challenge of course is to make it happen. There is no question that people still want books, but we do have an incredible opportunity to innovate – to make them more relevant, more valuable and more profitable.

Here is a look back at what we did previously:

Look beyond the book

Most books start with an author and idea, then seek an audience. We wanted to start from the target audience, their issues and aspirations. Design thinking is all about finding the right problem to solve, by understanding people more deeply, then quickly developing hypotheses and concepts to help stretch and shape their ideas further.

Insights that emerged, applicable to all books, included:

• “Book” is a bigger concept than a book … content which can be shared in any format and platform, which can also be interactive and evolving over time. It’s therefore more than content too.
• “Connect, context, content” … Start with the audience, develop a title and solution around their context, and only then create focused and relevant content.
• Develop a thread beyond a physical book … that starts from where the audience starts, then connect platforms to share initial knowledge, building interaction over time.

Design the right experience … platforms and content, conversations and community

Having agreed a clear direction for the concept, we were now more easily able to focus on the user experience. Starting from the different audience motivations, to follow a journey through which the book can be introduced, stimulate, facilitate, support and keep evolving over time. This includes how to combines apps, websites, books of different formats, events, workshops and interactions. Only once the user experience is defined, should we think about the production process, including for example how digital technologies can deliver new business models (like pay per chapter), custom branded (like sponsors), personalised content, global delivery on demand, and the ability to stay updated.

Insights that emerged, applicable to all books, included:

• Each platform has purpose … each format of content (app, website, book, etc) has a distinct, complementary and supporting purpose, creating a value-adding (amplifying) user journey.
• Content beyond words … Text is heavy and dry. Think how to use different types of graphics – from cartoons to photos, infographics, lists, Q&A, dialogue, video, podcasts, more.
• Content to conversation to community … communication is by definition two-way, but books limit this. How to use multi formats to create interaction, a conversation that grows as a movement.

Engage and grow together … engage people deeper, enable more, grow the book

Most publishers are incredibly poor at marketing their books. It is published and forgotten within weeks (maybe days). Yet books are just the starting point – of a conversation, of a community. They are the idea catalysts to build interaction, define an agenda, mobilise people and interest and actions. This is how people get more value, and where publishers can realise more value, and drive profitable growth. What is the market model (distribution channels, pricing formats and levels, business model, communication activity)? How will the book be activated and sustained (interplay of formats and audiences, relationship building, updating content, adding new, building conversation, a real community, building a brand)?

Insights that emerged, applicable to all books, included:

• Engage people creatively … more human, more distinctive, more meaningful pre-launch promotional activity, then gradual launch of formats/packages (like movie launches).
• Modular pricing … Packaging of content “HML” for pricing, with options for micro/custom payments (e.g. chapters) or inclusive (subscription). Freemium to make access simple bottom-up.
• The growing book … keep refreshing, adding, reinventing the concept so that the book evolves over time, getting richer and better. Becoming a brand beyond a book.

Read more about last year’s event

The next Future Book Forum will take place on 20-22 November 2018.

 

Lars Thinggaard is CEO of video technology company Milestone, based in Denmark, which was recently acquired by Canon. He is also a co-author of the Copenhagen Letter, which makes the case for a more ethical and sustainable technology sector, and one of the leaders of the growing Tech4Life movement in Denmark.

“I build my own compass,” he says and has championed authenticity in practice, be it in his leadership style or the impact of his technologies in society. His beer crate speeches are part of the company folklore (more about that later).

At Thinkers50 we recently described him as “the voice of conscience for the technology sector, offering a compelling Scandinavian alternative to Silicon Valley.”

Thinggaard is a leader who forges his own path. If he anticipates that the atmosphere during a management meeting might become a bit tense, he brings ‘scream pillows’. Then the participants can leave the meeting room and vent their emotions by screaming into the pillow. After that, the meeting can continue peacefully.

He has also built his own behavior compass, used to assess his managers, and give him an overview of the quality of management in the company. When it comes time for the managers to attend a leadership seminar, Lars has been known to engage artists who can train the team in how to visually express their strategic views.

He is one of the few leaders in the Danish business community who likes the limelight and engages in public debates.

In 2012, Thinggaard started an independent, innovative unit in Silicon Valley, contributing to Milestone’s growth.

“I could see that we were on our way to becoming a large organization, where complexity can make it difficult to realize new ideas. We decided to act as our own disruptors by establishing a new development center in Silicon Valley, because we wanted to be close to the newest trends and technology. The unit got its own budget, and dedicated resources that were not available to anyone else in the organisation” he says.

The centre now employs 20 staff members and just received a capital injection by Milestone’s owner since 2014, Canon, and is expected to employ more than 100 people within a few years. The next big innovative leap is cloud services within video technology.

“At the People’s Political Festival, I talked a lot about the countless European companies, like the Danish banks, that take these quick, week-long inspirational trips to Silicon Valley. But as they’re on the plane ride home, their everyday work is waiting to greet them Monday morning. They lose the train of thought and everything stalls. I didn’t want that to happen in our case, which is why we established an independent business unit in Silicon Valley. The best way we can bring something we want to happen to life is by creating a separate, focused unit. Safe, where the big corporation isn’t allowed to take the resources that are set aside for innovation. “

Thinggaard is very proactive, and when he wants to communicate his thoughts on leadership, he doesn’t hesitate to pick up the phone and call the other side of the world.

“When I wanted to explain what it meant to be your own disrupter, I thought about the American high jumper Dick Fosbury, who won the 1968 Olympics in Mexico and became world-famous for his ‘Fosbury Flop’ technique. Dick’s trainer was really against him back then. He thought it couldn’t be done. People had always jumped forward over the bar. So, I gave Dick a call to tell us about the way he works. He is an engineer and runs his own business, so it made sense to use him as a model of what it means to raise the bar,” said Lars.

He has also contacted former Danish prime minister Poul Schlüter, who served in several minority governments, to understand his view on how leaders can make difficult things happen.

“I interviewed him for four hours and left with two great pieces of advice: Always bring humour to the negotiation table and make sure that your counterpart leaves with something he can use. “

He has called many other people. When he hears something on the radio that captures his attention, he gives the person a call to find out more. “Many are naturally surprised when I call, but I think it’s an effective way to find out something new,” he said.

The next in line to get a call is Yuri van Geest, co-author of the book ‘Exponential Organizations’. The book has made a huge impression on Thinggaard and he’s planning to meet him.

“On my list of people I would like to interview is one of the best tennis players of our time, Andre Agassi. He’s incredibly eccentric, but his biography is one of the best I’ve read. I wouldn’t mind interviewing him,” said Lars.

Lars Thinggaard is also a big fan of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, whose quotes he likes to simplify to use as a mantra for his management style.

“I often use the quote: To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily; not to dare is to lose oneself. Innovating is about taking chances. If you don’t, you risk losing yourself and your entire business. So, it’s part of my management philosophy”

According to Lars, one of his greatest achievements is the development of Milestone Systems’ behavioral compass, which is used to assess the company’s management quality.:

“My starting point is a compass because I enjoy sailing. It’s all about choosing a course, and about the needle that points in a particular direction,” said Lars.

Lars Thinggaard uses the compass to measure managers’ abilities within business acumen, passion, empathy, developing others and empowerment, which is the ability to influence your own future through self-control.

“Once a year, I reward the best leader in Milestone. The reward is an old-fashioned crate full of good, Danish beer, because we practice ‘beer crate speeches’ (where a speaker stands on top of the crate, speaking in front of an audience) to train our leaders in speaking to and engaging their audiences.”

Several years ago, Lars Thinggaard bought Carlsberg’s stock of wooden beer crates, which can hold 50 bottles of beer each. The winner has to share the beer with his team and hold a speech while standing on top of the crate.

“When I first started this tradition, I didn’t anticipate that our winner would be in Australia. It cost me more than DKK 5,000 to ship the beers and the crate to Australia!” Lars laughed.

 

His recent ebook “Business Magnetism” tells the story of how a small company made friends with the world in a hurry. It is the story of Milestone Systems’ journey so far. Starting with a small Danish company which gathered a highly fragmented industry together into a business ecosystem, and redefining the perception of video technology.

Today, Milestone is a major player in this business worldwide. We did not do this alone, we used the power of partnerships. Business Magnetism is for “doers” committed to growing their businesses. It challenges conventional thinking, completely disregards models and provides a host of new perspectives.

Why magnetism? In physics, magnetism has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.

Thinggaard wants to change your understanding of companies on the rise; how to attract partners and develop sustainable, long-term profitable growth. It is a powerful way to accelerate a growing company.

These ideas transformed Milestone from a technology concept into a global business. Under Thinggaard’s leadership, Milestone has grown to become one of the most valuable companies within the video management software industry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oKtqkpInFM

His book takes a look behind the scenes into the mind of a CEO facing the opportunity of a lifetime. It gives us a first-hand view into the people behind Milestone, their experiences and dilemmas in building a global success.

 

Hit Refresh is about individual change, about the transformation happening inside of Microsoft and the technology that will soon impact all of our lives—the arrival of the most exciting and disruptive wave of technology humankind has experienced: artificial intelligence, mixed reality, and quantum computing. It’s about how people, organizations and societies can and must transform and “hit refresh” in their persistent quest for new energy, new ideas and continued relevance and renewal.

Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella tells the inside story of the company’s continuing transformation, tracing his own personal journey from a childhood in India to leading some of the most significant technological changes in the digital era.

Nadella explores a fascinating childhood before immigrating to the U.S. and how he learned to lead along the way. He then shares his meditations as a sitting CEO—one who is mostly unknown following the brainy Bill Gates and energetic Steve Ballmer. He tells the inside story of how a company rediscovered its soul—transforming everything from culture to their fiercely competitive landscape and industry partnerships.

“At the core, Hit Refresh is about us humans and the unique quality we call empathy, which will become ever more valuable in a world where the torrent of technology will disrupt the status quo like never before.”

As much a humanist as engineer and executive, Nadella concludes with his vision for the coming wave of technology and by exploring the potential impact to society and delivering call to action for world leaders.

“Ideas excite me,” Nadella explains. “Empathy grounds and centers me.” Hit Refresh is a set of reflections, meditations, and recommendations presented as algorithms from a principled, deliberative leader searching for improvement—for himself, for a storied company, and for society.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKCL_MEXqJo

Extract from blog by Satya Nadella, on writing his book:

About two years ago I set out to tell the story of Microsoft’s quest to rediscover its soul and imagine a better future for everyone. Today, the first copies of the book arrived — neatly boxed and orderly. I laughed to myself because the process to get to this perfectly packed box was messy at times, and the story itself was not always orderly. In fact, that was half the fun, and it’s why I wanted to write about it in the midst of experiencing it.

Here’s how I describe the impetus for “Hit Refresh”:

“The most compelling argument was to write for my colleagues—Microsoft’s employees—and for our millions of customers and partners. After all, on that cold February day in 2014 when Microsoft’s board of directors announced that I would become CEO, I put the company’s culture at the top of our agenda. I said that we needed to rediscover the soul of Microsoft, our reason for being. I have come to understand that my primary job is to curate our culture so that one hundred thousand inspired minds—Microsoft’s employees—can better shape our future. Books are so often written by leaders looking back on their tenures, not while they’re in the fog of war. What if we could share the journey together, the meditations of a sitting CEO in the midst of a massive transformation?”

“Hit Refresh” isn’t a victory lap or a how-to manual. That would be premature. It’s a set of reflections, ideas and principles on transformation. It explores the renaissance of a storied company and the implications of the coming wave of technology — artificial intelligence, mixed reality and quantum computing — which will soon disrupt the status quo impacting our lives, communities and economies. It’s also a set of questions for anybody searching for improvement — for themselves as leaders, for their institutions and for society.

In December 2015, on a cold, drizzly day in Redmond, Washington, my co-authors and I gathered in my office for one of our working sessions. We had sketched out some ideas over the previous months, and now it was time to get serious. We sat around a coffee table piled with books, articles, transcripts and the like. In this early meeting, we made two decisions that shaped the project.

The first, a title. When you “hit refresh” in your web browser by clicking the little arrow, or hitting “function+F5,” it updates. It doesn’t wipe everything away and start new, as Bill Gates writes in his Foreword for the book — it actually keeps some things and replaces others. Hitting refresh is required for any person and organization looking to make a sustained impact over a long period of time from athletes, leaders and artists to cities, corporations and societies. Some people and organizations have one major hit refresh moment and others hit refresh often. We believed hit refresh was the perfect metaphor for all three storylines of the book — my personal journey so far, the company’s ongoing transformation, and the coming wave of technological and economic change.

Secondly, we arrived at the answer to an important question I had been mulling over — what do we hope a reader will take away from all of this at the end? The answer: the power of taking everyday action driven by empathy. My hope is that “Hit Refresh” inspires people to discover more empathy in their own lives. It’s a quality my wife, Anu, helped me begin to learn when our son was born with severe disabilities 21 years ago. It’s a quality that shapes our mission of empowerment at Microsoft and our quest to meet unmet and unarticulated needs of customers. And it’s the quality that helps us as a society move forward in creating new opportunity for all.

It’s been an incredible learning opportunity to work on this project. My hope is that it’ll start important conversations and spark new ideas, and that others will share their own hit refresh moments.

Extract from Wired Magazine’s review of the book:

Satya Nadella is only three and a half years into his tenure as the CEO of Microsoft and he has already written a book about his experiences.

As he acknowledges in the book, it’s an odd time to write about running the tech giant. Nadella, getting out in front of the “why” question, says he wanted to write from the middle of the “fog of war”—the battle to rescue Microsoft from a slow fade into the background of the tech landscape. And there’s plenty of material here. In stepping out of the long shadow of former Microsoft leaders Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella has already accomplished what seemed impossible, increasing Microsoft’s market cap by $250 billion since taking control. As Fast Company recently pointed out, this adds up to “more value growth over that time than Uber and Airbnb, Netflix and Spotify, Snapchat and WeWork” combined.

The timing of the book’s arrival from Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, is even less peculiar when you also consider that one of Nadella’s central missions is to recreate Microsoft’s culture and image in the eyes of its employees, business partners, customers, investors, and, finally, the world. In Hit Refresh, the chief executive details the ways he seems to have made formerly disillusioned and perhaps embarrassed Microsoft employees proud of their work and employer again, partly by refocusing their sights on where the company was going, and why, rather than where it had fallen behind. He describes his pioneering approach to partnering with “frenemy” corporations.

The book itself is another way that Nadella is taking control of the Microsoft story, and the results are mixed.

For the average reader, Hit Refresh will be most compelling in the more personal sections, where Nadella describes his early life in India; the influence of his mother, a Sanskrit scholar; and his arrival in the US, where he attended University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee to complete his Master’s degree in engineering, and, with other Indian students, gave up smoking rather than stand outside during the shockingly cold winters. Nadella describes his awkward first interview at Microsoft, which he joined in 1992, when he was 25 years old. He eventually became head of the company’s cloud and enterprise group, and was credited for moving Microsoft to the cloud when he was tapped as CEO.

It’s intriguing to learn of the methods Nadella used as CEO to disrupt culture in the company, to change the style of communication from one that was top-down and rigid to one that was empathetic and collaborative. For instance, he recounts the time he used a company-wide spat over milk routinely being left to spoil out on the counter to drive home—with some levity—his belief in the “growth mindset,” and personal empowerment, as a way to solve problems, rather than complain about them.

In another instance, he recalls an early meeting with his senior leadership team in which he brought in sports psychologist Michael Gervais, who had worked with the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, to meet with Microsoft’s executives and bring their self-awareness to a deeper level. During that meeting, held on soft couches arranged in a circle, the managers opened up about their personal passions and philosophy. Nadella writes:

“We were asked to reflect on who we are, both in our home lives and at work. How do we connect our work persona with our life persona? People talked about spirituality, their Catholic roots, their study of Confucian teachings. They shared their struggles as parents and their unending dedication to making products that people love to use for work and entertainment. As I listened to them, I realized that in all my years at Microsoft this was the first time I’d heard my colleagues talk about themselves, not exclusively about business matters. Looking around the room, I even saw a few teary eyes.”

Unfortunately, the strange narrative arc of Hit Refresh means we soon lose these vivid, ground-level reports from inside Microsoft. The book moves from being a personal story, to a management how-to, to a series of long sections in which Nadella reflects on the future of digital rights and freedoms, artificial intelligence and augmented reality, quantum computing, and what he thinks countries will need to do to be included in the next wave of tech-enabled globalization (one that companies like Microsoft hope to lead, naturally). Those chapters read more like keynote speeches—albeit thoughtful, insightful speeches that include literary references and lovely summaries of various economic and philosophic theories.

The “refresh” in the title is meant to refer to the “refreshing” of a web page, which Nadella admits is a quaint notion in today’s web culture. It’s also his way of signalling his respect for the Microsoft that came before him, one that, by the time he took over, had turned into a collection of fiefdoms where secrecy ruled and hostility ran high between competing Microsoft businesses.

The empathetic spirit he begins to emphasize as CEO, as a way to bring the workforce together, is a value he also connects to Microsoft’s ethos more broadly: he argues that the company exists to help democratize the tremendous power of today’s computational abilities, the way Gates and co-founder Paul Allen democratized access to computers period. Nadella makes the case for the company becoming a ubiquitous tool in the lives of its users, who will soon be living in a world of ubiquitous intelligence. What end users will do with those tools—build companies, schools, or cure cancer—is where each of Microsoft’s 100,000-plus employees is supposed to find meaning. He links the company’s purchase of LinkedIn to democratizing employment opportunities, and emphasizes the value of Minecraft in classrooms, in his nod to that unexpected acquisition.

Nadella claims in the book that he has seen a “tangible shift” in Microsoft culture, though he considers the job a work in progress. Whether insiders will challenge this depiction remains to be seen, but Nadella’s personal dedication to seeing his work through an existential lens is convincing, most especially when he talks about his son, Zain, who was born with severe disabilities. He credits his experiences raising Zain, and his wife’s approach to parenting, with teaching him the meaning of—and need for—empathy. He writes:

During one ICU visit, after I took on my new role as CEO, I looked around Zain’s room, filled with the soft buzzing and beeping of medical technology, and saw things differently. I noticed just how many of the devices run on Windows and how they were increasingly connected to the cloud, that network of massive data storage and computational power that is now a fundamental part of the technology applications we take for granted today. It was a stark reminder that our work at Microsoft transcended business, that it made life possible for a fragile young boy.

The experience helps him see Microsoft’s mission in a new light, and in the process convinces the reader.

After revealing the 100 most influential people of 2017, Time Magazine‘s annual review continues with their 25 best inventions this year. Considering hundreds of inventions worldwide, the unranked list features everything from electronics, clothing, food, and more. Here’s what made the cut:

1. Jibo – The $899 social robot

Personal robots such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, have come a long way in recent years. But fundamentally, they’re still stationary speakers whose defining expression is a light that turns on when you speak. Jibo is different. It’s not just that he—and I use the term he here, because that’s how Jibo refers to himself—looks like something straight out of a Pixar movie, with a big, round head and a face that uses animated icons to convey emotion. It’s not just that his body swivels and swerves while he speaks, as if he’s talking with his nonexistent hands. It’s not just that he can giggle and dance and turn to face you, wherever you are, as soon as you say, “Hey, Jibo.” It’s that, because of all this, Jibo seems downright human in a way that his predecessors do not.

2. eSight 3 – AR glasses

For the millions of people who are legally blind, navigation is a routine challenge. Though support canes and guide dogs can help, they cannot mimic actual vision. eSight3 can. Think of it as the world’s most powerful pair of glasses: once users put on eSight, it records high­ definition video and uses magnification, contrast and proprietary algorithms to enhance that imagery into something the legally blind can see—enabling them to partake in a variety of activities, including sports, that would otherwise be off-­limits. At $9,995, the device, which launched in February, is not accessible to everyone (though the company does help connect would-­be buyers with funding sources, including grants). But it is cheaper than the company’s earlier iterations, as well as faster, lighter and equipped with better zoom capabilities. To date, the company estimates it has been used by more than 1,000 patients.

3. Halo Top – Gluten-free ice-cream

It sounds almost too good to be true: a flavor-packed, low-sugar ice cream with no more than 360 calories— per pint. But such is the promise of Halo Top whose containers invite patrons to “go ahead, eat the whole pint” in one sitting and whose product the company’s CEO, Justin Woolverton, routinely calls “healthy.” On the latter point, there has been some debate. Halo Top which is also enriched with protein, maintains its low calorie count using the zero-calorie sweetener Stevia, along with cane sugar and sugar alcohol. While those ingredients are fine to consume, they’re not exactly paragons of nutrition. Then again, Halo Top’s goal isn’t to replace fruits and veggies; it’s to give diet-conscious consumers “an option to eat ice cream again,” says Woolverton. To that end, Halo Top (which retails for about $5 per pint) is succeeding in spades. Its annual sales soared roughly 2,500% last year, and it recently beat out Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s to become the best-selling pint in America.

4. Fenty Beauty – Rihanna’s newly-launched makeup line

5. Ember Mug – $80 smart mug

6. Thyssenkrupp MULTI – A multi-directional elevator

What if elevators could move sideways, instead of just up and down? It’s a question straight out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Germany-based Thyssenkrupp has a real-life answer: MULTI, a system of elevators that ditches old-school pulleys for the same magnetic levitation tech that enables high-speed trains. The elevator cars can travel in multiple directions and even pass each other within a shaft—features that could not only reduce wait times, but also fundamentally “change how buildings are constructed,” says Andreas Schierenbeck, CEO of Thyssenkrupp Elevator. (Think horizontal offshoots of straight, vertical towers.) Following a successful test this year, the first MULTI is set to debut in Berlin by 2021.

7. iPhone X – Apple’s latest flagship smartphone

8. Nike Pro hijab – A sports hijab to empower Muslim athletes

9. Forward – $149 per month high-end wellness clinic

10. adidas Futurecraft 4D – 3-D printed sneakers

11. Tesla Model 3 – All-electric four-door luxury sedan

12. Willow Pump – Smart breast pump system design for breastfeeding

13. Nest Secure – Home security system

14. NASA Mars Insight – Robotic Mars lander designed to study the interior and subsurface of Mars

The train to Mars pulls out only once every two years. That’s how often Earth and its neighbor move into alignment for the quickest possible journey from one planet to the other. NASA plans to make good use of the 2018 window, with the planned launch in May of the Mars Insight lander, which, as its name suggests, will give scientists their best look ever at the interior of the Red Planet. (The InSight was initially slated to launch in ’16, but glitches in its seismograph system led to delays.) Unlike Curiosity and other Mars rovers, this craft will stay in one place. But with good reason: it will hammer a probe more than 16 ft. into the Martian surface to study the planet’s thermal history—in effect, taking its geological temperature. Meanwhile, the seismometers will study Mars’ composition, an X-ray radio link will analyze wobble (the way Mars spins on its axis and is gravitationally tugged by other bodies in the solar system), and cameras will return panoramic and 3-D pictures. The space- craft should operate for 728 Earth days (708 Martian sols)—or until just about the time the 2020 flight is ready to go.

15. Oculus Go – Virtual reality headset

16. Tasty One Top – Induction cooktop that syncs with the Tasty smartphone app to guide chefs through different recipes

17. DJI Spark – The camera drone for everyone

Airborne drones have exploded in popularity over the past few years, improving everything from mapmaking to search-and-rescue operations. The DJI Spark has a more down-to-earth goal: helping anyone take better photos, videos and “dronies,”a.k.a. drone selfies. To that end,it’s easier to operate( gesture recognition means you can control it with a wave of your hand), harder to crash (an array of sensors help prevent midair collisions) and relatively cheap ($499)—though its maximum flight time of 16 minutes is shorter than higher-end models. “We see Spark as the starting point of a whole new series of drones,” says Paul Pan, DJI senior product manager. So far, that strategy is working: thanks in part to the Spark, which launched in June, China-based DJI sells half of all drones bought in the U.S.

18. Molekule – High-end air filter

19. Michelin Vision Concept – Updated tire tech with 3­D-­printed treads

20. Norton Core – Smart Wi-Fi router designed to detect abnormalities

21. Bempu – Temperature­-monitoring bracelet for babies

22. Nintendo Switch – The seventh major video game console developed by Nintendo

23. VICIS Zero1 – A stronger and safer football helmet

24. GreenWave 3D Ocean Farm – Grow oysters, mussels, clams and seaweed on ropes anchored to the ocean floor

The future of farming is growing oysters, mussels, clams and seaweed on ropes anchored to the ocean floor. So says Bren Smith, a commercial fisherman turned director of GreenWave, a Connecticut nonprofit doing just that. The concept isn’t as wild as it may seem. As land farming becomes increasingly problematic—it accounts for a growing portion of the planet’s greenhouse­-gas emissions—and oceans get overfished, humans will need to develop alternative food sources. GreenWave’s crops offer compelling advantages: they’re protein-­rich, self­-sufficient (no fertilizer needed) and they even help combat climate change (by sequestering carbon as they grow). Of course, getting Westerners to center their diet on mollusks and seaweed is a stretch. Still, GreenWave sees potential: the group has helped fishermen establish 14 farms along the coast of New England since 2013, and now has plans to expand in California, the Pacific Northwest and Europe.

25. Fidget Spinners

Hmmm. Not sure about that last one!

AR has seen a huge growth over the last three years, embraced by brands to create more engaging, more interactive, and more talked-about “experiential” promotional activities.

Consumers are happy to “augment” their world with useful content, information and offers, while establishing more emotional connections with brands. Mobile AR users are predicted to reach 200 million by 2018, which means this is a format likely to grow rapidly.From mobile apps for interactive catalogues to one-off publicity stunts in shopping malls to augmented product packaging ‒ the options are limitless.

Forbes predicts that the AR market is expected to continue this trend; it’s projected to reach $117.4 billion by 2022.

Here are some of the most inspiring and practical applications:

Augment’s platform for AR marketing apps

One of the most popular tools used in AR marketing is the prosaically named Augment. Augment really only does one thing, but it does it well. Clients create custom “trackers”, which are printed or on-screen icons, that are then scanned with a white labeled app to trigger a video or a 3D model overlaid on the real world.

It’s a very simple concept, but Augment’s execution is flawless. The company has landed clients ranging from Samsung to Paradise Wildlife Park. Their platform is versatile enough to allow for trackers to be placed in print catalogs, for the purpose of “trying out” furniture or other items at home, or on more novel objects like stuffed animals, in the case of the wildlife park.

US Postal Service’s augmented tracking

The United States Postal Service is a surprisingly tech-savvy organization. They were one of the first to adopt online tracking and shipment creation, and have kept their website and other online features on par with competitors in the private sector like FedEx and UPS.

At the end of 2014, the organization launched their take on augmented reality marketing. The USPS AR app let users scan collection boxes (the big blue mailboxes) with their smartphones and be treated to a holiday display ranging from dancing penguins to Christmas lights. The video ends with the opportunity to order boxes, stamps, and other USPS supplies.

Weather forecasts with real estate partners

That old standby of the local news broadcast, the weather, has shifted to include augmented reality in their presentations. Weather forecasters have long used green screens, a forebear of augmented reality, to add some interest to their discussions of heat waves and storm fronts. With Max Reality, a new software product by The Weather Channel, weather forecasts have been brought into the 21st century.

Max Reality uses AR to seamlessly integrate 3D imagery into televised weather news, bringing animated rain clouds, snowstorms, and even traffic maps and humidity graphs into the space formerly occupied only by a weather man or woman.

AR marketing analysts are already savvy to the opportunities offered by this technology. In an interview with EMarketer, The Weather Channel’s Bill Dow brainstormed ideas for direct product placement in this new type of weather segment.

Pokémon GO is still a rich source of ideas

Although the Pokemon GO craze has cooled if not ended entirely, its impact on local marketing will last for years. The monetization scheme of the app, in which users could buy lures to attract Pokemon to specific regions, was a boon for local businesses. Buying a lure to sit in one’s coffee shop or bar is the very essence of augmented reality marketing. It places a digital object in the physical space of the business, and invites players to come interact with the object… and patronize the business while there.

Augmented reality company Niantic Labs, creators of the game, were quick to capitalize on the trend. In July, they announced that they would partner with businesses to create “sponsored PokeStops”, taking money in exchange for spawning monsters at particular locations. Jamba Juice takes the trend even further, giving players 10% off a purchase if they show their game to the cashier.

Modiface’s augmented beauty marketing

Augmented reality makeup “mirrors” have been a fixture in Sephora and other cosmetics retailers for several years. Although they began by simply superimposing a splash of color onto a photo of a customer’s face, the technology has greatly advanced since then.

Today, companies like Modiface use AR to completely map the user’s face and re-render it as a photorealistic 3D object. This allows the mirrors to accurately show the precise effects of makeup and even extended-time skin care regimens on the face.

As anyone who has ever shopped for cosmetics knows, choosing between the vast array of products available is time-consuming and difficult, and there are no guarantees of success. Using AR, Modiface lets buyers “try before they buy”, simulating a full application of makeup or months of skin care in the space of a moment.

Starbucks AR stunt 

The latte wizards at Starbucks have been leveraging technology in the pursuit of the perfect cup for years. They pioneered the use of mobile pay, allowing customers to pay for drinks using their phones starting in 2011, years before the advent of Apple Pay. Over the years, they have also launched a number of amazing marketing campaigns that used the latest technology to wow visitors.

One of their best marketing stunts used augmented reality. In early 2012, the “Everylove on Every Cup” campaign turned every Starbucks cup into a Valentine’s Day card. Visitors used a dedicated Starbucks AR app to scan their cups and watch the design come to life, spreading wishes of love and the opportunity to purchase Starbucks gift cards.

Entertaining, educating … AR does much more

Universal Studios, as well as being a popular theme park, has always doubled as a way for Universal to market their upcoming films and franchises. The park takes in over 2 billion dollars annually, and it’s no surprise that the park loves to use AR and other cutting-edge technologies in their attractions.

At Universal Studios Orlando, park visitors can now engage directly with the dinosaurs of the Jurassic Park franchise, including the upcoming Jurassic World 2. By standing on a Hollywood star, visitors trigger an AR display on overhanging screens as a variety of dinosaurs walk up to investigate the humans. This is augmented reality marketing at its most impressive, the sort of experience that can only be achieved at a destination.

Here are some of the most memorable AR marketing moments of recent years:

1. Lynx: Angels Will Fall 

To promote the Lynx Excite fragrance (a brand also known by the name AXE in some countries), a two-day marketing stunt was set up in Victoria Station (London) and New Street (Birmingham), where commuters were able to interact with virtual angels that appeared on a giant digital screen when they stood on the signs that read ‘Look up’. The campaign won two Bronze Cannes Lion awards in the Outdoor and Media categories and was inducted into the Outdoor Hall of Fame.

Tom Peters received the Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award on Monday at what has become “the Oscars of management thinking”. Amidst hundreds of fellow business gurus, the great Charles Handy introduced Tom’s personal “search for excellence”, a journey that has seen Tom use his famous book as an excuse to rant and rave at the world’s business leaders for the last 40 years.

Sharing a glass of champagne with the 75 year old American, just before he went on stage, I told him how he was the man who had inspired me to explore the business world. And ultimately to join the world of consultants, educators and speakers too. As Tom himself likes to remind everyone, “business is so damn simple – listen to and serve your customers well, treat your employees even better, and find the simplest way to deliver what people want.”

I told him how my own father – a comprehensive school headteacher in northern England always talked about Tom, despite never working in business. I even remember how “In Search of Excellence” was the only business book we ever had in my parent’s home.

My Dad once engaged Tom to talk at a conference of teachers.  As president of the headteachers’ association at the time, he had had to persuade many colleagues that an American business guru really had something relevant to say about education. But his message transformed many of their minds – what their role was really about, why teaching matters to society, and in many ways, why they are the keys to the future. Indeed, on Monday Tom told me that working with teachers had been one of his most satisfying audiences, because of the difference they could make to so many children’s futures.

On stage, Tom was back to his favoured ranting. “Zuckerberg will have the epitaph on his tombstone as the man who killed truth” he proclaimed in disgust at the way in social media platforms have allowed news agendas to be hijacked and manipulated, resulting in the demise of truth and trust. At the same time I reminded him that as trust in institutions has declined, trust in our peers has grown, often enabled by our socially connected worlds. True he agreed, but best of all he reflected “it has allowed small businesses to thrive, to be just as great – maybe a lot better than big companies … I absolutely love small businesses”.

His rants went on – about the immoral distortions of business by the “playground” of Silicon Valley, and about the intellectualisation of much of business thinking – the irrelevance of business schools, and the artificial hype of thought leadership. “Why use words like talent, when we just mean people?”. Comparing a 1990 video of Tom in full guru flow, to today on stage, he did seem like a bit of a grumpy old man. Whilst in the past his passion was to inspire what is possible, it seems more that he is now more concerned about what is wrong. Nevertheless, he was as provocative and entertaining as ever.

Tom was born in Baltimore in 1942.  He graduated from Cornell with a degree in civil engineering and then gained an MBA form Stanford, plus a PhD in organisational behaviour. The title of his dissertation was “Patterns of Winning and Losing: Effects on Approach and Avoidance by Friends and Enemies.”

He spent 4 years serving in the US Navy, in Vietnam and then later working in the Pentagon. In 1973 he spent two years working in the White House as a senior drug-abuse advisor, during the Nixon administration.  In 1974 Tom joined McKinsey, becoming a partner in organisation effectiveness, then leaving after 7 years to become an independent consultant.

The publication of his incredibly popular business book In Search of Excellence in 1982 marked a turning point in Tom’s career.

When he joined McKinsey he was asked to explore “why do businesses so often fail to effectively implement new strategies?”, so Tom was asked to look at “organisation effectiveness and implementation issues” in an inconsequential offshoot project nested in McKinsey’s rather offbeat San Francisco office.

In Search of Excellence became a bestseller, gaining exposure in the United States at a national level when a series of television specials based on the book and hosted by Peters appeared on PBS. The primary ideas espoused solving business problems with as little business-process overhead as possible, and empowering decision-makers at multiple levels of a company.

The best thing about Tom is his attitude. He loves business, and people. He rants and raves, but in order to inspire and energise. He entertains too. And he makes you think.

Thinkers50 Global Awards 2018: Who is the most influential business thinker?

At Thinkers50 we dedicate ourselves to bringing together the best ideas for business leaders, curating the theories and practices of gurus across the world, to help leaders think smarter and win in a fast-changing world.

Over the last year we’ve been incredibly busy developing the concept further – including the launch of new “IdeasLabs” in Odense (Thinkers50 Europe) and Qingdao (Thinkers50 China), we’ve also launched some ground-breaking books (Dear CEO, 50 Letters to the World’s CEOs from the Best Thinkers), a new speakers agency (get all the top people in one place), and we put on the top business event in Europe this year (Thinkers50 European Business Forum 2017).

At the heart of all of this are the thinkers … The Thinkers50 global ranking is published every two years, it is the essential guide to which business thinkers and ideas are in – and which have been consigned to business history. The Thinkers50 ranking is unveiled at the “Oscars of Management Thinking”.

Here are the 2017 winners:

Breakthrough Idea Award

The Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award celebrates a Eureka moment in management. It is given for a radical idea, which has the potential to forever change the way we think about business. From Taylorism to the Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, new ideas have challenged what we know about the world. This award is dedicated to the legacy of CK Prahalad, who proved there is nothing so practical as a great idea.

Previous winners: Rachel Botsman for collaborative consumption (2015); the Ellen MacArthur Foundation for the circular economy (2013); and Vijay Govindarajan for the $300 house (2011).

Winner: Emotional Agility/Susan David

How do you stay sane in a relentlessly changing world? Make sense of paradox? Keep disrupting and shaping your own thinking to stay with, or get ahead of the zeitgeist? Susan is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, and is co-founder of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital. She is the author of Emotional Agility (Penguin, 2016), which Harvard Business Review rated as one of its Management Ideas of the Year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIAk9p-EYT4&t=71s

 

Other nominees were

The DRIVE Framework/Mark Esposito & Terence Tse

Mark Esposito teaches at Harvard University’s Division of Continuing Education and is a senior professor at Grenoble Graduate School of Business in France and a fellow at the Judge Business School at Cambridge University. Terence Tse is an associate professor of finance at the London campus of ESCP Europe Business School and head of Competitiveness Studies at the i7 Institute for Innovation and Competitiveness.

They are authors of DRIVE: Understanding How the Future Unfolds (Lioncrest, 2017).

100 Coaches/Marshall Goldsmith

One of the world’s leading executive coaches and author, most recently of Triggers (Crown, 2015), Goldsmith has launched a project to pass on his knowledge to the next generation. The original plan was to attract 15 coaches who would commit to passing on their own knowledge to 15 others. Such was demand that the project was expanded to 100 coaches.

The 100-Year Life/Lynda Gratton & Andrew Scott

London Business School professors and authors of The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity (Bloomsbury, 2016). Gratton and Scott’s book heralds massive social upheaval – and opportunity for social and commercial innovation.

The Purpose Economy/Aaron Hurst

Author of The Purpose Economy (Elevate, 2016), Hurst is the CEO of Imperative, a technology platform that helps people to discover what gives them purpose in their work. He is the founder of the Taproot Foundation where he helped develop the $15 billion pro bono service market.

Onlyness/Nilofer Merchant

Silicon Valley-based ex-Apple exec, Merchant is the author of 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era (HBR, 2012). Her latest book is The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World (Penguin Random House, 2017).

Corporate Rebels/Joost Minnaar, Pim de Morree & Freek-Jan Ronner

Known as “The Corporate Rebels,” Minnaar, de Morree and Ronner are on a mission to make work more fun. They quit their frustrating corporate jobs and set out to travel the globe and visit the world’s most inspiring organizations, from Spotify to Patagonia, sharing their insights as they go.

Awesomely Simple/John Spence

The author of five books, John Spence’s rallying call is “Making the Very Complex…Awesomely Simple.” In his twenties, he was the CEO of an international Rockefeller foundation, overseeing projects in 20 countries. He has been the owner or CEO of six companies and currently serves on the board or as an adviser to several companies. He speaks and teaches throughout the world.

Digital Thinking Award

Digital technology has transformed the world of work. It has also changed the way we understand ourselves as human beings. But which thinker’s research and insights shed the newest and most original light on the new digital reality? The Thinkers50 Digital Thinking Award celebrates the thinker who has done the most to convert the digital language of the 0 and 1 into useful human insights.

This Award was introduced in 2015 and won that year by Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee.

Winner: Don Tapscott & Alex Tapscott

Networks are more powerful than ever – their value multipliers with every additional participant. They drive exponential impact. New technologies like blockchain will enable the next generation of the internet-based world to have any more profound impact on markets. Authors of The Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World (Portfolio, 2016), an international bestseller. Canadian technology trailblazers, they are also co-founders of the Blockchain Research Institute. Don Tapscott is the author of The Digital Economy, Wikinomics and other global bestsellers.

 

Other nominees were:

1. Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee

Directors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Initiative on the Digital Economy and co-authors of The Second Machine Age (Norton, 2014) and Race Against the Machine (Digital Frontier Press, 2011). Their latest book is Machine, Platform, Crowd (WW Norton, 2017).

2.  Kate Darling

An expert in robot ethics, Darling is a researcher at the MIT Media Lab. Her work explores the emotional connection between people and life-like machines and anticipates difficult questions that lawmakers, engineers, and the wider public will need to address as human-robot relationships evolve.

3.  Jose Esteves

Professor of Information Systems at Spain’s IE Business School, Esteves’ work is at the forefront of understanding how technology impacts lives – from hacking to e- government and cyber-attacks. He is co-author of Value in a Digital World (Springer, 2017).

4.  Martin Ford

Martin Ford is a futurist focusing on the impact of artificial intelligence and robotics on society and the economy, and the author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (Basic Books, 2015) and The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future (Acculant, 2009). He is founder of a Silicon Valley-based software development firm.

5.  Anindya Ghose

An Indian-born professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Ghose’s work focuses on economic issues and consumer behaviour as it relates to the internet, mobile, digital marketing, big data, and business analytics. In his book TAP: Unlocking the Mobile Economy (MIT Press, 2017), Ghose discusses the opportunities created by the global prevalence of and dependence on smartphones.

7.  Sherry Turkle

The Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, as well as the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, a center of research and reflection on the evolving connections between people and artifacts. She is the author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press, 2015) and Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2011).

8. Hu Yong

A professor at Peking University’s School of Journalism and Communication, Hu Yong’s publications include Internet: The King Who Rules, the first book introducing the Internet to Chinese readers, and The Rising Cacophony: Personal Expression and Public Discussion in the Internet Age, documenting major transformations in Chinese cyberspace. He is co-founder of the Digital Forum of China, a nonprofit organization that promotes public awareness of digitization and advocates a free and responsible Internet. His blog has a readership of seven million.

Innovation Award

If necessity is the mother of invention, then innovation is its nurturing father. The word innovate comes from the Latin to “make new.” It has never been more pressing – in society or in organizations. The Thinkers50 Innovation Award recognizes the thinker who has contributed the most to our understanding of innovation over the last two years.

Previous winners: Linda Hill (2015), Navi Radjou (2013), and Clay Christensen (2011).

Winner: Scott Anthony

Scott is a great strategic thinker, and I am currently using his A+B+C dual transformation to help a pharma client deliver today’s business whilst also creating tomorrow. Managing partner of Innosight, the innovation and growth consulting firm, he is the author and co-author of several books, including (with Clay Christensen) Seeing What’s Next (HBR, 2004) and The First Mile (HBR, 2014). His latest book, Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today’s Business While Creating the Future, co-authored with Clark Gilbert and Mark W. Johnson, (HBR Press 2017), tackles how successful incumbent companies can counter the threat of disruption.

 

Other nominees were

2. Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden

Lean thinking and design evangelists, founders of the global Lean UX movement, and authors of Sense & Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products (HBR Press, 2017). They argue that becoming a sensing organization requires shifting from managing outputs to what the authors call “outcome focused management.”

3. Jeanne Liedtka

Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School at the University of Virginia, Liedtka was formerly the chief learning officer at United Technologies Corporation. She is the co-author of Designing for Growth: A design toolkit for managers (Columbia Business Press, 2011) and Solving Problems with Design Thinking: Ten Stories of What Works (Columbia Business Press, 2011). Her forthcoming book is Designing for the Greater Good.

4. Soren Kaplan

A former Hewlett Packard executive, Kaplan is an affiliated professor at the Center for Effective Organizations at USC’s Marshall School of Business. He is the founder of the consulting firm Innovation Point, and a co-founder of iCohere, a web collaboration platform for online learning and social networking. His latest book The Invisible Advantage (Greenleaf, 2017) looks at how firms create and sustain a culture of innovation.

5. David Robertson

David Robertson is Professor of Practice at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2002 through 2010, he was the LEGO Professor of Innovation and Technology Management at IMD. Robertson is the author (with Bill Breen) of Brick by Brick: How LEGO Reinvented its Innovation System and Conquered the Toy Industry, (Random House, 2013). His latest book is The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-risk, High-reward Approach to Innovation (HBR Press, 2017).

6. Christian Seelos & Johanna Mair

Johanna Mair is a professor at the Hertie School of Governance and the Distinguished Fellow at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and a senior research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Christian Seelos is a visiting scholar at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford, and the Leo Tindemans Chair of Business Model Innovation at KU Leuven. Seelos and Mair are the authors of Innovation and Scaling for Impact: How Effective Social Enterprises Do It (Stanford Business Books, 2017).

7. Tendayi Viki

The founder and principal consultant at Benneli Jacobs, a strategy and innovation consultancy firm that helps companies develop their internal ecosystems to innovate like startups, Viki co-designed and helped implement Pearson’s Product Lifecycle, an innovation framework that won Best Innovation Program 2015 at the Corporate Entrepreneur Awards. He is the co-author, with Dan Toma and Esther Gons, of The Corporate Startup: How Established Companies Can Develop Successful Innovation Ecosystems (Vakmedianet, 2017).

8. Howard Yu

Professor of Strategic Management and Innovation at IMD in Switzerland, Yu specializes in technological innovation, with a focus on why and how some firms can sustain new growth while others cannot. His award-winning paper, “Leopards sometimes change their spots: How established firms can transform themselves,” argues that as well as being vulnerable to disruption from new start-ups, incumbent companies can also leverage their advantages.

Leadership Award

Teams, corporations, and organizations of every kind, demand and require leadership. Yet the nature of that leadership and how we understand the role of the leader is constantly being reappraised. The Thinkers50 Leadership Award acknowledges thinkers who shed powerful and original new light onto this perennial and still vital subject.

Previous winners: Marshall Goldsmith (2015 and 2011), and Herminia Ibarra (2013).

Winner: Hal Gregerson

Leadership is about asking the right questions, not having all the answers. Hal is all about questions. Executive director of the MIT Leadership Center and a senior lecturer in leadership and innovation at MIT’s Sloan School, he is the author of 10 books. His question-centric research project to surface insights into how leaders can build better questions to unlock new solutions helped defined what Gregersen calls his Catalytic Questioning methodology.

 

Other nominees were:

1. Angela Duckworth

Angela Duckworth is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the founder and CEO of Character Lab, a nonprofit whose mission is to  advance the science and practice of character development. Duckworth studies grit and self-control, two attributes distinct from IQ. Her first book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (Simon & Schuster, 2016) was a New York Times bestseller.

2.  Sydney Finkelstein

The Steven Roth Professor of Management and Faculty Director at the Tuck Center for Leadership, Syd Finkelstein is the author of several best-selling books including Why Smart Executives Fail and What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes (Portfolio, 2003). His latest book, the result of a ten-year research project, is Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent (Penguin Portfolio, 2016).

3.  Heidi K. Gardner

Author of Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos, (HBR Press, 2017), Gardner’s work focuses on leadership and collaboration in professional service firms. She is a distinguished fellow at Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession and faculty chair of the school’s Accelerated Leadership Program.

5.  John Mattone

John Mattone is one of America’s leading executive coaches, with over 30 years’ experience in the fields of leadership and human capital management. He champions the 4As of leadership: Altruism, Affiliation, Achievement, and Abundance. He is the author of Talent Leadership (Amacom, 2012) and Intelligent Leadership: What You Need to Know to Unlock Your Full Potential (Amacom, 2013). His latest book, co-authored with Nick Vaidya, is Cultural Transformations: Lessons of Leadership and Corporate Reinvention (Wiley, 2016).

6.  Margarita Mayo

Margarita Mayo is professor of leadership and organizational behaviour at IE Business School in Madrid. A Fulbright Alumni of Harvard University, and research award winner at the Center for Creative Leadership, her latest book Yours Truly: How to Stay True to Your Authentic Self (Bloomsbury, 2018) explores what it means to be an authentic leader.

7.  Karl Moore

An expert in CEO and C-Suite leadership, Karl Moore is an associate professor at the Desautels Faculty of Management McGill University and an associate fellow at Green Templeton College. His current research looks at introvert/ambivert/extrovert leaders in the C-Suite and the issues faced in leading millennials. His book Effectively Working with Millennials will be published later in 2017.

8.  Simon Sinek

Born in the UK and now based in the US, Simon Sinek is a marketing consultant and lecturer at Columbia University. He is the author of four books including the 2009 best seller Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (Penguin, 2009) and Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Some Don’t (Penguin, 2015). His latest book is Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team (Portfolio, 2017).

Strategy Award

Where you are going and how you intend to get there lie at the heart of management and leadership. Strategy is the intellectual and inspirational lifeblood of organizations. The Thinkers50 Strategy Award celebrates the very best of strategic thinking. If you were running a corporation, who would you turn to for strategic advice?

Previous winners: Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur (2015); Rita McGrath (2013); W Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne (2011).

Winner: Richard D’Aveni

The Bakala Professor of Strategy at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, D’Aveni is the author of a number of influential books including Hypercompetition (Free Press, 1994), Beating the Commodity Trap (HBR Press, 2009) and Strategic Capitalism (McGraw-Hill, 2012). His forthcoming book, When Titans Rule the World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), builds on his HBR article “3-D Printing Will Change the World,” and charts the rise of “panindustrial” manufacturers.

 

Other nominees were:

1. Weiru Chen

Weiru Chen is an associate professor of strategy at the China Europe International Business School, where he teaches industry and competitive analysis, business model innovation, and strategy. He is the author (with Cho-Hsuan Yu) of Platform Strategy: Business Model Revolution, a Chinese bestseller based on a study of 40 Chinese firms and 20 global companies.

3.  Pankaj Ghemawat

Indian-born Pankaj Ghemawat is the professor of management and strategy and director of the Center for the Globalization of Education and Management at the Stern School of Business. He is also the Anselmo Rubiralta Professor of Global Strategy at IESE Business School in Spain. He is the author of World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve it (HBR Press, 2011) and The Laws of Globalization (Cambridge, 2017).

4.  W Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne

W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne are Professors of Strategy at INSEAD and Co-Directors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute. They are the authors of the New York Times, #1 Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller Blue Ocean Shift – Beyond Competing (Hachette, 2017) and the over 3.6 million copy international bestseller Blue Ocean Strategy, which is recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written. Blue Ocean Strategy is published in a record-breaking 44 languages.

5.  Rita G McGrath

On the faculty of Columbia Business School since 1993, Rita McGrath is the author of The End of Competitive Advantage (Harvard, 2013). She is also co-author of MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves that Drive Exceptional Business Growth (HBR Press, 2005), and The Entrepreneurial Mindset (HBR Press, 2000). Her next project, tentatively entitled “Discovery Driven Advantage,” examines how companies can build true proficiency in innovation.

6.  Roger Martin

The former dean of University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, Martin is a strategy advisor to CEOs worldwide and the author of ten books, including Thinkers 50 award winners Playing to Win (with AG Lafley, HBR Press, 2013) and Getting Beyond Better (with Sally Osberg, HBR Press, 2015). His new book Creating Great Choices (with Jennifer Riel, HBR Press, 2017) follows up on his 2007 bestseller The Opposable Mind (HBR Press).

7.  Alex Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur

Yves Pigneur is a Belgian computer scientist and Alex Osterwalder is a Swiss consultant and founder of Strategyzer. They are the authors of Business Model Generation (Wiley, 2010), which has sold more than one million copies in 30 languages. They invented the “Business Model Canvas,” used by companies worldwide. The original book has been followed by Business Model You (Wiley, 2012) and Value Proposition Design (Wiley, 2014).

8.  András Tilcsik

Hungarian-born Tilcsik is an assistant professor of strategic management at the Rotman School of Management and a faculty fellow at the Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship. In 2015, he and Chris Clearfield won the Bracken Bower Prize from McKinsey and the Financial Times, given to the best business book proposal by scholars under 35. The book, Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It, is forthcoming (Penguin, 2018).

Talent Award

In ancient Greece, the talent was a unit of currency. Today, human talent has become the global currency, with organizations competing for the very best people from around the world. With the changing attitudes to work and new generations entering the workforce, the challenge now is to better understand how talented individuals work best and how they can effectively be attracted, motivated, and retained. Research into talent has never been so important and practically useful.

This award was introduced in 2015 and won that year by Stew Friedman.

Winner: Amy Edmondson

The Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, Amy Edmondon’s field research into teamwork has spanned a range of environments including the cardiac surgery operating room; factory floor; and executive suite. She is the author of Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy (Jossey-Bass, 2012) and Extreme Teaming: Lessons in Complex, Cross-sector Leadership (Jossey-Bass, Sept 2017).

 

Other nominees were:

1.  Ayse Birsel

Ayse Birsel is co-founder and creative director of the design and innovation studio Birsel + Seck. The Turkey-born, New York-based designer is the creator of Design the Life You Love (Ten Speed Press, 2015), a book and coursework that teaches non- designers how to create a meaningful life using her design process. This process is labeled Deconstruction: Reconstruction (DE:RE).

2.  Shane Cragun & Kate Sweetman

Founding partners at the consulting firm SweetmanCragun, their latest book is Reinvention: Accelerating Results in the Age of Disruption (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2016). A former editor at Harvard Business Review, Sweetman teaches at MIT’s Legatum Institute for Entrepreneurship. Cragun is co-author of The Employee Engagement Mindset (McGraw Hill).

3.  Carol Fishman Cohen

CEO of iRelaunch, Fishman Cohen consults to corporations on career reentry strategy. Her return to work at Bain Capital after 11 years out of the full-time workforce is documented in a Harvard Business School case study. Her article “The 40-year old intern” was selected for HBR’s 90th anniversary celebration of articles that made the biggest difference to readers’ lives. Her TED talk “How to get back to work after a career break” has been viewed over 1.4 million times and translated into 27 languages.

5.  Sallie Krawcheck

CEO and co-founder of Ellevest, a digital financial advisor for women, and the owner and chair of Ellevate Network, Sallie Krawcheck was previously the president of the Global Wealth and Investment Management division of Bank of America. An outspoken commentator on the topic of Wall Street regulatory reform, she is the author of Own it: The Power of Women at Work (Crown, 2017).

6.  Lauren Noël & Christie Hunter Arscott

Lauren Noël is managing director of QUEST, a global leadership institute for early career women. Her work focuses on engaging, advancing and inspiring women in the first decade of their careers. Christie Hunter Arscott is a principal at QUEST. She is an expert on gender and generational strategies, and formerly deputy leader of Deloitte Consulting’s US Diversity & Inclusion Service Offering.  They are the authors of “What executives need to know about millennial women” (ICEDR, 2015).

7.  Jennifer Petriglieri & Gianpiero Petriglieri

INSEAD professors Jennifer Petriglieri and Gianpiero Petriglieri are the authors of the Harvard Business Review article “The Talent Curse: Why High Potentials Struggle – and How They Can Grow Through It” (May-June 2017). They have previously been shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Radar Award and the Thinkers50 Leadership Award, respectively.

8.  Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

An international authority in psychological profiling, talent management, and people analytics, Chamorro-Premuzic is the CEO of Hogan Assessment Systems, Professor of Business Psychology at University College London, and a visiting professor at Columbia University. He has published eight books and is co-founder of metaprofiling.com, a digital start-up that enables organizations to identify individuals with entrepreneurial talent.

Ideas Into Practice

There is nothing so practical as a great idea. At Thinkers50 we value new thinking that makes a meaningful contribution in the real world. Equally, we admire organizations that are open to new ideas no matter what their source. The T50 Ideas into Practice Award celebrates an organization putting new ideas to work.

This award was introduced in 2015 and won that year by Zhang Ruimin, CEO of Haier Group.

Winner: Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez is director of the Program Management Office at the pharmaceuticals company GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines and former chair of the Project Management Institute. He was head of post-merger integration at Fortis Bank, leading the largest takeover in financial service history: the acquisition of ABN AMRO. He is the author of The Focused Organization (Routledge, 2012) and creator of the Hierarchy of Purpose concept.

 

Other nominees were:

2.  Mary C. Gentile

Professor of Practice at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, Mary Gentile is the creator and director of Giving Voice to Values – a pioneering business curriculum for values-driven leadership. A senior advisor at the Aspen Institute Business & Society Program, she is the author of Giving Voice To Values: How To Speak Your Mind When You Know What’s Right (Yale University Press, 2010). Giving Voice to Values has piloted in over 900 business schools and organizations globally.

3.  ofo

Putting the sharing economy to work is the Chinese bike-sharing startup ofo. It began life two years ago with its founders pooling private savings of 150,000 yuan ($21,800). Dai Wei, the 26-year-old entrepreneur, named the firm ofo as the letters look like a bike. Its value was recently calculated as more than $3 billion. Over 6 million of the company’s bright yellow bikes can be found in more than 150 Chinese cities, and are now moving into London and Singapore with a planned expansion to 20 countries, including Japan, Spain, France, Netherland, Germany, and the Philippines.

4.  The Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management

The UK’s Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management works to promote excellence in leadership on behalf of all doctors in the National Health Service and at all stages in their medical careers. The CEO and medical director is a former neurosurgeon, Peter Lees, a long-time champion of the importance of leadership in the medical world.

5.  Adele Sweetwood

Adele Sweetwood is senior vice president of global marketing for SAS. She is the author of The Analytical Marketer: How to Transform Your Marketing Organization (HBR Press, 2016). Challenged to change by its company’s own analytical products, the SAS marketing organization was forced to rethink. The book presents practical guidance for developing a marketing culture that thrives on and adds value through data and analytics.

6.  Peter Terium & Deborah Rowland

In 2016 RWE AG Group CEO, Peter Terium, and change coach, Deborah Rowland, concluded an innovative transformation programme of a 62,000-strong energy company. Over the course of 3 years, a radical leadership development programme for the company’s top 360 leaders – using Rowland’s Still Moving model of change leadership – helped transform a century-old energy company, leading to a more open, collaborative, agile and socially responsible organization fit for the 21st century. RWE has now undergone a significant split and launched one of the fastest and most successful IPO’s in German history.

7.  Anita Krohn Traaseth

Anita Krohn Traaseth is the managing director of Innovation Norway, the Norwegian Government’s most important instrument for innovation and development of Norwegian enterprises and industry. Previously, she was CEO of Hewlett-Packard Norway. Traaseth has also had leading positions in Simula Innovation, Intelligent Quality, and Det Norske Veritas. In August 2012, she began to publish a personal blog on leadership, titled tinteguri and went on to publish her first book, Good enough for the bastards – courage, vulnerability and credibility (Kindle, 2014).

8.  Louise van Rhyn

Louise van Rhyn is a social entrepreneur who believes the worlds’ biggest problems can be solved through cross-sector collaboration and an understanding of complex social change. In 2010, she started the School at the Centre of Community Social Change Process and the Partners for Possibility Leadership Development Process to change education in South Africa through collaborative partnerships between business leaders and school principals.

Radar Award

Which of the new generation of business thinkers is most likely to shape the future of business and business thinking? Whose work has the potential to challenge the way we think about management? With the Thinkers50 Radar Award we identify and celebrate the thinker-most-likely-to.

Previous winners: Erin Meyer (2015), Nilofer Merchant (2013), and Lucy Marcus (2011).

Winner: Amy Webb

Amy Webb is a quantitative futurist. She is a professor of strategic foresight at the NYU Stern School of Business and the founder of the Future Today Institute. Webb’s research focuses on the future of technology, business, governing and society, and her work has been featured in the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, MIT Sloan Management Review, Guardian, BBC and elsewhere.

Other nominees were:

1.  Noah Askin

Assistant professor of organizational behaviour at INSEAD, Askin’s research interests include social and cultural networks, status, the production and consumption of music, and higher education. His TED talk, “The recipe of a hit song” examined what makes a song reach the top 100 Billboard chart.

2.  Alexander Betts

Betts is Professor of Forced Migration and International Affairs and director of the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the politics and economics of refugees. He is the author of Mobilising the Diaspora: How Refugees Challenge Authoritarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Refugee Economies: Forced Displacement and Development (Oxford University Press, 2016). Most recently he co-authored Refuge (Allen Lane, 2017).

3.  Zoë Chance

Former marketing manager at Mattel and now a professor at the Yale School of Management, Zoë Chance examines persuasion and decision-making through the lens of behavioural economics. Her 4Ps Framework for Behaviour Change was the foundation for Google’s global food guidelines, helping 60,000 people make healthier choices every day. Her TEDx talk on influencing behavioural change is called “How to make a behaviour addictive.”

4.  Mona Hammami Hijazi

Former US President Jimmy Carter describes Hammami Hijazi as “a leading voice on global giving.” The author of The Giving World (Thinkers50, 2016), she is a director at the Office of Strategic Affairs, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court. Previously, she was a lead associate at the consulting firm Booz & Company and also worked as an economist with the International Monetary Fund and the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. She has authored several articles and policy papers published by the IMF.

5.  Mark Greeven

Mark Greeven is a Dutch academic based in Hangzhou, China, with a ringside seat on fast evolving developments in Chinese management and leadership. He is an associate professor at Zhejiang University’s School of Management. In addition, he is a research fellow at China’s National Institute for Innovation Management and the International Institute for Asia Studies. He is co-founder of the ERIM China Business Research Centre.

6.  Maja Korica

Croatian born Maja Korica is an associate professor at Warwick Business School in the UK. Her research focuses on understanding the nuances of complex and rarely seen organizational settings, particularly at the top of organizational hierarchies, and has appeared in leading practitioner publications including MIT Sloan Management Review (“Staying in the know: overhauling your personal knowledge structure,” 2015).

7.  Katherine Milkman

Katherine Milkman is an associate professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and an associate professor at the Perelman School of Medicine. Her research uses “big data” to document various ways in which individuals systematically deviate from making optimal choices. Her work has examined what factors produce self-control failures and how to reduce them. She has also explored race and gender discrimination, focusing on how a decision’s context can alter the manifestation of bias.

More: Thinkers50 European Business Forum 2017